Letters: Metro-bashing

This refers to articles by A K Bhattacharya and Sunil Jain about E Sreedharan who heads the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC). It is true that DMRC has had an unfortunate string of accidents in the past few days. It is also true that some negligence may be involved on the part of some officials. But it is not correct to engage in personal bashing of Sreedharan, who remains a public hero and one of the few people in government who actually give some confidence to us Indians that we can achieve something.

Jain writes ‘Time to go, Mr. Sreedharan’ (July 20)and that he is not ‘infallible’. I would like to ask whether Jain can suggest another person who can lead from the front to build something like the Delhi metro. He speaks of three chairmen being appointed in National Highways Authority of India(NHAI) as if that is the best way to go about things, not mentioning that the NHAI is way behind schedule on most of its projects only because of frequent change of leadership. And it also appears that Jain sees the meddling of politicians and bureaucrats in organisations as a good thing.

Jain lauds the CAG report for its “stunning indictment” of DMRC and says that the company is pretty much run by Sreedharan. I wish he had taken the trouble of reading The Times of India and other papers which reported that DMRC is subject to legislative accountability as it has to report to many Parliamentary committees. Even the tabling of the CAG report itself in Parliament shows that DMRC is accountable to the government!

Jain claims that the CAG report says that DMRC watered down testing standards to meet deadlines. What he does not mention is that this observation was with regard to only four contracts out of several dozen. I feel that Jain has used disjointed facts selectively to build a tirade against Sreedharan.

Earlier, Bhattacharya(‘Engine diversion a new gauge’, July 17) had also personally attacked Sreedharan and portrayed him as something of a show-off when he wrote that “Sreedharan appeared not to be averse to enlarging his legend of a deeply religious, honest man who had beaten the odds in public life”. I thought that was below the belt and only demonstrated Bhattacharya’s bias against Sreedharan. I also remember having a good laugh as Bhattacharya even got Sreedharan’s birthday wrong, though he started and ended his column with a reference to it(it’s June 12, incidentally).

Nirmal Desai, New Delhi